Adams Robyn, Cox Rosanna. Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture
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78 Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture
between ‘official’ diplomatic activity and intelligencing for profit, however
deferred, was porous and elastic. Moving away from the unhelpful and
vague term ‘spy’ (although, of all the handles given to these figures in the
period, ‘spy’ or ‘espyall’ would probably feature most often, and carry
a pejorative sense), a focus on these men who, like Herle, operated on
the fringes of government activity, enables us to begin to anatomize the
amorphous private and crown Elizabethan information networks of the
early modern period. The group of agents who sent select items of news
to appropriate ministers or court figures with whom they had a con-
nection (however tenuous), whom we may also term intelligencers or
informers, fed and fortified the decision-making process of statesmen.
Herle’s status as a conduit through which informal correspondence and
negotiation could occur between prominent English and Low Countries
statesmen suggests that essential diplomatic activity was not limited to
those sent out of England with instructions issued by the Queen and
Privy Council. Reward for diplomatic work was not limited to high
status figures, as the skills acquired on legation were eminently transfer-
able to a government administrative department upon return home.
Agents like Herle operated on behalf of England’s ministers, through
the transmission of information, discussion with local officers or even
conversation with the host monarch. Patriotic zeal and religious fervour
aside, for many agents, the impulse for collecting information was
basic – to ensure the means of subsistence. Intelligencing for personal
profit, albeit through the service of the crown, could call the agent’s
allegiance into question. The repeated affirmations of loyalty and humble
service with which information-gatherers like Herle’s correspondence
is flecked, suggest that the agent’s visible interconnectedness within
the endorsed patronage structures of early modern England went some
way to mitigate this economic tension.
42
Uniting the dual impulses of
protecting Elizabeth and her realm and advancing his own prospects,
Herle’s letters open to wider view the methods and technologies of the
communication of intelligence, founded upon and driven by a sophis-
ticated and intricate patronage network.
Notes and references
1. British Library (hereafter BL) MS Lansdowne 36 fols. 181r–182v. 17 June 1582,
William Herle to Lord Burghley.
2. For the full edition of Herle’s letters in English, see The Letters of William Herle ed.
R. Adams (2006) Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, http://www.livesandletters.
ac.uk/herle/index.html. For Herle’s ideas of service based upon the transfer of
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Robyn Adams 79
intelligence, see R. Adams (2009) ‘A Spy on the Payroll? William Herle and
the mid-Elizabethan Polity’, Historical Research 83 (2010): 266–80, and (2009)
‘Signs of Intelligence: William Herle’s report of the Dutch Situation, 1573’,
Lives and Letters, I, April. For discussions of ministerial intelligence networks
of the later sixteenth century, see S. Alford (2008) Burghley: William Cecil at
the Court of Elizabeth I (New Haven & London: Yale University Press), esp.
pp. 167 and 319, and P.J. Hammer (1999) The Polarization of Elizabethan
Politics: the Career of Robert Devereux, 2
nd
Earl of Essex, 1585–97 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
3. Herle was sent to negotiate a loan from Germany in the 1560s. Several copies
of instructions survive for this journey; however, no instructions survive for
Herle’s numerous other journeys.
4. BL MS Lansdowne 54, fols. 150r–v, 152r–v, 6 August 1587, William Herle
to Lord Burghley. O. de Smedt describes Herle as a ‘servant’ and ‘skilled
businessman’ of Garrard, (1954) De Engelse natie te Antwerpen in de 16e eeuw,
1496–1582 (Antwerp), p. 213; R. Ehrenberg (1896) Hamburg und England im
Zeitalter der Konigin Elisabeth (Jena), p. 61.
5. Herle had been in debt to the Waad family since at least the 1570s.
6. These letters are located primarily in the State Papers (Holland and Flanders)
at The National Archives, London, and in the British Library, in the Cotton
collection.
7. The National Archives (hereafter TNA) State Papers (hereafter SP) 83 15/36.a
fol. 77r–82v. 3 March 1582. William Herle to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.
8. I am grateful to Dr Jan Broadway for pointing out (in relation to a separate
episode in Herle’s quasi-diplomatic career) that Herle would require some
kind of official endorsement from the English authorities, even if his ‘mission’
was not a formal one.
9. TNA SP 83 15/39, fols. 94r–95v. 4 March 1582, George Gilpin to Sir Francis
Walsingham. Herle was not in receipt of a regular stipend during his resi-
dence in Antwerp, see TNA SP 83 15/74, fols. 167r–168v. 21 March 1582,
William Herle to Lord Burghley.
10. See, for example, Thomas Bodley’s voluminous diplomatic correspond-
ence between Cecil and the Privy Council between the years 1588–97, The
Diplomatic Correspondence of Thomas Bodley, ed. Robyn Adams (2009) Centre
for Editing Lives and Letters, http://www.livesandletters.ac.uk/bodley/bodley.
html.
11. TNA SP 83 16/3 fols. 2r–5v. 5 May 1582, William Herle to Sir Francis
Walsingham.
12. TNA SP 83 15/68, fols. 148r–152v. 18 March 1582, William Herle to Lord
Burghley.
13. The Joyeuse Entrée cost 30 stuivers to buy from the shop attached to the
Plantin printing house. Herle could have opted to send his patrons the
cheaper quarto edition which lacked the engravings and etchings for which
the folio version is well known, only retailing at 2 stuivers. A stuiver was
equivalent to roughly 30 English pence. L. Voet (1980) The Plantin Press
(1585–1589): A Bibliography of the Works Printed and Published by Christopher
Plantin at Antwerp and Leiden 6 volumes, (Amsterdam: Van Hoeve), vol. 2,
p. 953. La Joyeuse et Magnifique entrée (1582) (Antwerp: Christopher Plantin).
See also Emily Peters (2008) ‘Printing Ritual: the performance of community
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80 Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture
in Christopher Plantin’s La Joyeuse & Magnifique Entrée de Monseigneur
Francoys . . . d’Anjou’, Renaissance Quarterly, 61:2, 370–413.
14. TNA SP 83 15/68, fols. 148r–152v.
15. For a detailed account of the two assassination attempts upon William of
Orange, (the second one successful) see Lisa Jardine (2005) The Awful End
of Prince William the Silent: the First Assassination of a Head of State with a
Handgun (London: HarperCollins).
16. Jardine (2005), p. 65. Jardine notes that many printed accounts state that
Maurice participated in the reprisal on the assailant.
17. TNA SP 83 15/73 fols. 163r–166v. 21 March 1582, William Herle to the Earl
of Leicester.
18. A.J. Butler (1907) ed., Calendar of State Papers, Foreign (London: His Majesty’s
Stationery Office) 1581–2, Vol. 15, number 617. Etienne Lesieur to Sir Francis
Walsingham, 19 March 1582.
19. TNA SP 83 15//72 fol. 72r–73v. John Norris to Sir Francis Walsingham, 20
March 1582.
20. TNA SP 83 15/73 fols. 163r–166v.
21. BL Cotton Galba C VII fols. 226r–227v, suggests that Herle was reprimanded
for his bleak report on the ‘unlikely’ survival of Orange, ‘that I sholld be so
hastye in advertiseng things for understanding, that nether were assured nor
lykelye’. 14 April 1582, William Herle to the Earl of Leicester.
22. TNA SP 83 15/87 fols. 191r–192v. 1 April 1582, William Herle to Lord Burghley.
23. TNA SP 83 15/74 fols. 167r–168v. 21 March 1582, William Herle to Lord
Burghley. (My) italics denote marginalia by Herle.
24. Indeed, the practice was familiar to Burghley. In February 1590, Burghley sent
a letter to Thomas Bodley indicating that he had sent a copy under separate
cover, ‘And bicawse a former letter of mine with the said Project might mis-
carry; I have verbatim cawsed both to be dowbled, for more suretie, and for
your direcion thearein’, BL MS Harleian 287 fols. 188r–189v.
25. For more on early modern postal systems, including those constructed for
the carriage of diplomatic mail, see Alan Stewart (2008) Shakespeare’s Letters
(Oxford: Oxford University Press), esp. chapter 7. See also Philip Beale (2005)
England’s Mail: Two Millennia of Letter Writing (Stroud: History Press).
26. See Nadine Akkerman’s essay in this volume.
27. TNA SP 83 15/87 fols. 191r–192v.
28. BL MS Cotton Galba D III fols. 273r–274v. Thomas Bodley’s cipher, endorsed
28 November 1588.
29. BL MS Cotton Galba D VII fol. 345r–v. Lord Burghley to Thomas Bodley, 24
December 1590. Bodley’s supplementary cipher is BL MS Harleian 287 fol.
187r–v. For a brief survey of the provision of diplomatic codes and ciphers, see
Alan Haynes, (1992) The Elizabethan Secret Service (Stroud: Sutton Publishing).
30. It is difficult to credit that the queen would be presented with a letter that
had not been deciphered for her survey of the contents.
31. See Nicole Greenspan (2005) ‘News, Intelligence and Espionage at the Exiled
Court at Cologne: the Case of Henry Manning’ in Media History 11:1/2,
105–25.
32. BL Cotton Galba C VII, fols. 211r–212v. 31 March 1582, William Herle to the
Earl of Leicester. See also TNA SP 83/15/88 fols. 193r–194v, for a scribal copy.
Colonel Morgan is probably Sir Thomas Morgan, see ODNB.
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Robyn Adams 81
33. BL MS Cotton Galba C VII fols. 222r–223v. 14 April 1582, William Herle to
the Earl of Leicester.
34. BL MS Cotton Galba C VII fols. 226r–227v.
35. See OED, ‘cowntenance’, n. 8, ‘Patronage; appearance of favour’.
36. David Potter (2005) ‘Mid-Tudor Foreign Policy and Diplomacy’, in Susan
Brigden and Glenn Richardson, eds, Tudor England and its Neighbours
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 106–38, p. 110.
37. Potter, p. 109.
38. Jeremy Black (1997) The Diplomacy of a Rising World Power: Britain 1603–1800
(Diplomatic Studies Programme: University of Leicester), p. 7.
39. TNA SP 83 16/3 fols. 2r–5v.
40. For ‘knowledge transactions’, see Lisa Jardine (1996) Reading Shakespeare
Historically (London & New York: Routledge), esp. chapter 6, ‘Alien Intelli-
gence: Mercantile exchange and knowledge transactions in Marlowe’s The
Jew of Malta’.
41. Robert Beale, A Treatise of the Office of a Councellor and Principall Secretarie to
her Majestie in Conyers Read (1925) Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of
Queen Elizabeth (Oxford: The Clarendon Press).
42. Greenspan, pp. 117–18.
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82
5
Sidney, Gentili, and the Poetics
of Embassy
Joanna Craigwood
Early modern Europe was newly concerned with diplomacy as a
representative art. Medieval diplomatic messengers gradually gave way
to ambassadors acting in the ongoing interests of sovereign states. The
introduction of the permanent embassy is symptomatic of this transition
from a series of communications to an art and practice of representation.
1
Literature is also an art and practice of representation – and the parallel
was not lost on early modern diplomatic theorists. Their understand-
ing of the ambassador as a faithful and persuasive representative of his
sovereign, in word and deed, placed diplomatic theory in conversation
with theories of rhetorical, poetic and dramatic representation.
2
As many
theorists noted, the Romans called ambassadors oratores, or orators,
and early modern diplomatic treatises repeatedly ask how to use words
well. This rhetorical approach was rooted in the broader literary and
philosophical concerns of Renaissance humanism, which also shaped
the period’s literature and poetics. From the composition of Ambaxiator
Brevilogus in 1436 to the 1680 publication of L’Ambassadeur et ses
fonctions, European treatises on embassy engaged with many of the
same rhetorical and representational considerations as contemporary
European literature. These crossovers between literature and diplomacy
were equally clear to literary authors. European writers as wide-ranging
and influential as Torquato Tasso, Luís de Camões and Pierre Corneille
drew on the analogies between literary and diplomatic representation.
3
This essay traces one exceptionally important and previously unstud-
ied instance of this dialogue between diplomatic theory and literary
representation. It examines the personal and intellectual exchange that
took place between the diplomatic theorist Alberico Gentili and the poet,
diplomat and literary theorist Sir Philip Sidney in early modern England.
Gentili was an Italian civil lawyer and professor at Oxford University,
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Joanna Craigwood 83
and he was without question the most important and influential
diplomatic theorist to work in England in this period. He is generally
considered to have founded the field of international law alongside the
Spanish scholar Francisco Suárez and the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius.
Sidney, meanwhile, was famous as both a courtier and a poet, and his
poetic treatise, the Defence of Poesy, stands among the most important
works of English literary theory. The intellectual exchange between these
leading theorists emerged from direct discussion between them: Gentili
not only dedicates his 1585 diplomatic treatise De Legationibus Libri Tres
to Sidney but also credits Sidney with a formative role in its theory of
embassy. This dedication has often been noted as passing evidence
of Sidney’s intellectual interests and patronage, but the implications
of Gentili’s acknowledgments to Sidney have never been pursued.
4
This chapter illuminates the intellectual exchange between Gentili and
Sidney and, through them, the conceptual interface between diplomatic
and literary theory in early modern England. I argue that these two
influential theorists share a conceptual understanding of representation
that underlies their thinking on both literature and diplomacy.
The interrelation of early modern literature and diplomacy has recently
begun to attract critical attention, as the introduction to this volume
observes, but much remains unknown in this significant field.
5
Timothy
Hampton suggests that we might seek a diplomatic poetics: he has in mind
both a way of reading literature that is attuned to its diplomatic implica-
tions and a way of reading diplomacy that ‘would take into account its
fictional and linguistic dimensions’.
6
In this chapter, I use ‘poetics of
embassy’ to indicate both a theory of literature informed by diplomatic
ideas and a theory of diplomacy informed by literary-theoretical concerns.
I do so with the awareness that what we now know as literary theory and
poetics was, to early modern writers, the study of the intersecting, even
inseparable, arts of rhetoric and poetry, grounded in classical rhetoric and
poetics, and incorporating moral philosophy.
My broader point is that junctures of literature and diplomacy – when
diplomatic theory draws on literary theory, or ambassadors and embassy
feature in literature – raise considerations and concerns about the art of
representation. This brings diplomacy into conversation with the philo-
sophical and literary-critical ideas surrounding mimesis – a term that
Sidney defines as the ‘art of imitation’ and then glosses as ‘a representing,
counterfeiting, or figuring forth’.
7
I draw consciously on the long Western
philosophical tradition of theorizing literary and artistic representation
as mimesis, from Plato and Aristotle onward, when I describe diplomacy
as a mimetic art in this chapter.
8
This would have made sense to early
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84 Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture
modern thinkers, who commonly treated both jurisprudence and politics
as arts and understood these arts with reference to classical thought.
Indeed, the Italian legal tradition in which Gentili trained employed
Aristotelian ideas about mimesis to define the law as an art that imitates
nature, because it reproduces natural principles through legal fictions.
9
The early modern dialogue between diplomatic and literary representa-
tion took place within a well-established dialogue between the principles
of law, politics and poetics.
10
Embassy is more precisely the representation of sovereigns and sover-
eignty, and here too cross-pollination between legal, political and poetic
philosophy is important. The idea that the poet is sovereign appeared
as early as Petrarch, in fourteenth-century Italy, and built on the idea
that poetic creativity is akin to the creation of new legislation by a
sovereign prince, a quasi-divine creation of something out of nothing;
as Ernst Kantorowicz observes, this analogical reasoning employed a
Renaissance juristic technique known as aequiparatio or equiparation:
that is, the placing two or more things on a legal equality.
11
However,
such analogical thinking is hardly restricted to the law, and prince and
poet were far from the only early modern sovereigns: God was sovereign
of all; the reason sovereign in the body; and the Christian platonic trio of
truth, beauty and goodness (or virtue) were sovereign religio-philosophical
ideals.
12
Poetry, then, could be ambassadorial in representing the poet, or
his or her reason, or divine and philosophical truths – or all of these
things. The equiparation of sovereignty across these different spheres is
central to this chapter’s investigation of poetic embassy as the represen-
tation of sovereignty.
The exchange between Sidney and Gentili – and diplomatic and liter-
ary theory in early modern England – sits within this broad context. In
this essay, I argue that Sidney and Gentili share a protestant platonic
understanding of ambassadorial and literary mimesis as analogous rep-
resentations of sovereignty. In the first section I trace the personal and
intellectual relationship between Sidney and Gentili. I then argue that
Gentili, at Sidney’s suggestion, develops a protestant platonic model
for understanding ambassadorial representation as a mimetic art in his
1585 treatise on diplomatic theory, law and practice, De Legationibus
Libri Tres (Three Books on Embassies).
13
Sidney’s poetic treatise, The
Defence of Poesy (circa 1582), uses an equivalent protestant platonic
model to understand poetic mimesis, which Sidney places under the
implied trope of embassy. I end by tracing this trope of embassy in
Sidney’s unfinished prose fiction, the revised Countess of Pembroke’s
Arcadia (circa 1584).
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Joanna Craigwood 85
Gentili and Sidney
Alberico Gentili (circa 1552–1608) was an Italian civil lawyer who came
to England in 1580 after his religious beliefs had attracted the attention
of the Inquisition. In 1581 he was incorporated into Oxford University
and appointed professor of Roman law, and in 1587 he became the
University’s Regius Professor of Law, a post he held until his death in
1608. Gentili published prolifically throughout his career, particularly
on international law. Anthony à Wood’s seventeenth-century his-
tory of Oxford University records that he was ‘the grand ornament
of the University in his time’, while modern criticism recognizes his
seminal contribution to the field of international law.
14
Gentili was also
involved in some of the most important politico-legal questions of his
day. In 1584 the Privy Council consulted him on the highest profile
diplomatic case of Elizabethan England, in which the Spanish ambas-
sador Don Bernadino de Mendoza was accused of conspiracy against
Queen Elizabeth’s life, but (in a groundbreaking ruling) granted exemption
from trial on the grounds of diplomatic immunity and instead exiled from
England.
15
Around 1590 he delegated his lectures at Oxford and moved
to London to practise at the Admiralty Court, where he worked primarily
on international legal disputes between the rebelling Dutch provinces
and their Spanish overlords.
16
Gentili belonged to the Italian Bartolist
school of law, as opposed to the French legal humanist school, but he
was, of course, steeped in the broader humanist intellectual culture of
Renaissance Europe. He engaged actively with classical literature and
philosophy and also had an interest in poetry and poetics; he pub-
lished treatises in defence of poetry and drama in 1593 and 1599.
17
Christopher Warren has traced poetic concerns in his legal work on
war, and Hampton has noted rhetorical and dramatic aspects of his
diplomatic theory, although he has not connected them with Sidney or
the conceptual model I outline in this chapter.
18
These new connections
expose previously unappreciated poetic and philosophical influences
on Gentili’s diplomatic theory.
Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86), and his influence as a poet, prose writer
and literary theorist, need little comment here. Sidney is well known
as one the most important writers, and arguably the most important
poetic theorist, in early modern England. His interest in diplomacy,
his diplomatic ambitions, and his contemporary fame as a courtier are
also well documented. Biographical narratives often give central place to
his disappointed aspirations to diplomatic work and his intense and
enduring interest in international affairs, noting an education that
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86 Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture
actively prepared him for diplomatic work, his embassy to the Holy
Roman Emperor in 1577, and his attempts to gain further diplomatic
employment from the queen.
19
In the most recent biography of Sidney,
Katherine Duncan-Jones opens a chapter on Sidney’s one full diplo-
matic mission with the bold claim that ‘1577, when Sidney was sent
to the Holy Roman Emperor, was the best year of his life’.
20
F.J. Levy
argues that Sidney’s entire education prepared him for diplomatic
work, particularly his Continental tour of 1573–75, on which (Levy
suggests) Sidney’s mentor Hubert Languet ‘consciously trained Sidney as
England’s future ambassador’.
21
Much of the criticism on Sidney’s writ-
ings addresses political, cultural and religious concerns related to his
European and diplomatic interests. Yet virtually none of this research on
Sidney’s intersecting ‘poetics, piety and politics’ addresses Sidney’s views
on the actual art of embassy. None at all explores embassy and poetry
as analogous mimetic arts, or pursues this analogy through Sidney’s
relationship with Gentili.
22
These connections reveal a significant new
conceptual link between Sidney’s poetic and diplomatic interests.
Gentili and Sidney met some time between 1580 and 1584. Most of
our knowledge about the relationship between the two men comes from
Gentili’s dedicatory letter to Sidney in De Legationibus. This letter is, how-
ever, supported by considerable corroborating evidence. Sidney’s uncle,
the Earl of Leicester, became Gentili’s patron shortly after Gentili arrived
in England. On 24 November 1580, Leicester, who was the Chancellor
of Oxford University as well as a powerful political figure and patron of
the arts, wrote to recommend that the University incorporate Gentili
‘because he is a stranger and learned and an exile for religion’.
23
This
letter is addressed from the Court, where Gentili was apparently first
introduced to Leicester; as Leicester’s heir presumptive, Sidney was
often with his uncle, and we know he was at Court for at least some of
the winter of 1580–81.
24
It is likely, then, that Sidney and Gentili met
late in 1580, as Gentili’s biographer Gezina van der Molen assumes.
25
Gentili remained part of the intellectual circle enjoying Leicester’s
patronage: he wrote gratefully to Leicester’s secretary reporting on his
reception at Oxford; he dedicated a book to Leicester in 1582; and it
was probably through Leicester’s agency that he was invited to advise
the Privy Council on the Mendoza case.
26
We can be certain, then, that
Gentili was attached to the intellectual and literary group known as the
Leicester/Sidney circle.
In his dedicatory letter to Sidney in De Legationibus, Gentili claims
that he corresponded and often met with Sidney. He describes his work
on embassy as the result of these previous discussions: ‘So I treated
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Joanna Craigwood 87
the subject of the Ambassador, which, as you know, you had previously
induced me to investigate, and had aided me in threshing out with
every variety of Socratic device’ (‘Tractaui itaque de Legato quæstionem, &
(vt scis) eam, in quam despiciendam tu me olim deduxeras, atque expli-
candam penitus Socratico omni artificio adiuuaras’).
27
Gentili adds that,
following Sidney’s encouragement to investigate embassy, he gave a
speech on the subject at Oxford before both Sidney and Leicester, which
he then expanded into the treatise De Legationibus in about the space of
six months (fol. A5
r
).
28
The dedication is dated 21 July 1585 (fol. A5
v
)
and Leicester visited Oxford in January of 1585; there is strong evidence
that Sidney was with his uncle.
29
Leicester’s disbursement book for the
years 1584–86 records that his secretary gave five pounds ‘in reward
by your lordship’s commandment to Synneor Gentyle at Oxeford’ on
11 January 1585.
30
This payment gives a credible date for the speech
Gentili mentions; his assertion that it ‘seemed to give satisfaction’
(‘placere uisa fuit’) could even be an oblique reference to Leicester’s
reward (fol. A5
r
). Moreover, we know that Sidney also commissioned
readings and reports on diplomatic matters from the academic Gabriel
Harvey and the lawyer John Hammond.
31
Gentili’s claims in his dedicatory
letter and the external evidence, taken together, make a compelling case
that Sidney (together with Leicester) instigated and influenced Gentili’s
work on embassy.
Gentili’s treatise provides a remarkable insight into the nature of that
influence, because his attributions to Sidney provide a vital clue to the
content of their discussions: they link Sidney with platonic thought.
In both his dedication and conclusion he claims that the treatise aims
to describe the form or idea of the perfect ambassador on Sidney’s model,
on the second occasion reinforcing the platonic character of this ideal
form by also citing Socrates (fol. A4
r
, p. 231). Gentili is flattering his
dedicatee; yet it is significant that he chooses to do so in platonic terms,
given his claim that Sidney aided him in his thinking about embassy
with every Socratic device (‘Socratico omni artificio’) (fol. A5
r
). A hint
lurks in Gentili’s choice of the word artificium – a word for device that can
also mean ‘theory of the art’ – that Sidney’s Socratic method might also
have aimed at a platonic theory of the art of embassy. When all this is
taken together with Sidney’s known interest in platonism, it looks very
much like Sidney and Gentili discussed embassy in platonic terms. This
insight turns out to be the key to the conceptual framework that unites
their theories of embassy and poetry.
Sidney’s debt to Plato and his various followers and commentators
has been much debated; his philosophical position is most plausibly
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10.1057/9780230298125 - Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, Edited by Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox
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